Category Archives: Cooking

When food and environment writers suggest that you should cut down on meat and eat more vegetarian foods, one of the things they suggest most often is to eat more beans.
Lovely idea. I wish they would also spend more time suggesting recipes – and more precisely, a variety of recipes that can keep you eating [...]

If cooking was a Hollywood movie, oil would be relegated to a very small supporting role. A couple of lines, nothing memorable, nothing to build a career on.
Frankly, with the way most generic vegetable oils taste, that’s a proper casting. Your average corn, canola or sunflower oil doesn’t have have much personality: it may be [...]

In mid-January, the New York Times published an article by Melissa Clark entitled Recapturing the Glory of Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts. The premice to the article was that this piece of chicken, lauded for dietary reason, was also a rather boring, as far as flavor and texture were concerned. With the help of some fine [...]

This is kind of a double-layered post. It’s about braising, but only after roasting.
It starts with a roasted leg of lamb, cooked rare, as it should, with a nice coating of herbs, spices and olive oil, with a crispy outside and moist inside.
It continues with the leftover meat, which is

Some leftovers are particularly tough to deal with. For years I’ve dreaded the extra meat left after a Chinese fondue. That thinly sliced meat is not an easy thing to cook. Boiling it is kind of boring, stewing it leads to a rather mushy result, and frying it is also not as simple as it [...]

OK, I’ve got a resolution that should be easier to keep than, say, quitting smoking or losing ten pounds. Next time you cook, whether following a recipe or improvising, let go of the measuring implements, and follow your instincts and your senses.
I’m not proposing that we go back to pre-Fannie Farmer, Boston Cookbook days, when [...]

In the days when I dabbled in creative management consulting, over ten years ago, one case study that came up was how Canon had redefined its business, at one point. I’m telling this from memory, so details may be off somewhat, but bear with me. Instead of considering itself as a manufacturer of particular goods [...]